Winter Soldier Read Free

torturing prisoners, refusing to treat injured Afghans and Iraqis, looting, taking “trophy” photos of the dead, and falsifying reports to make it look as though civilians they killed were actually “insurgents.” Their goal: to show that high-profile atrocities like the torture of prisoners inside Abu Ghraib and the massacre of twenty-four innocent civilians at Haditha were not isolated incidents perpetrated by a “few bad apples,” but part of a pattern of increasingly bloody occupations.
    They also demonstrated, by relating their firsthand experiences, how the military occupation of a foreign country inevitably leads to an increase in racism, dehumanization, and sexism directed both outward at the enemy and inward into the soul of the servicemember. Many of the veterans who testified apologized to their peers and to the American and Iraqi people. Others (and sometimes these were the same veterans) used their testimony to try to break their fellow citizens out of a collective apathy that allows the war and occupation to continue.
    “These are the consequences for sending young men and women to battle,” former Marine Corps Rifleman Vincent Emanuele said in one of Winter Soldier’s opening panels. “What I’d like to ask anyone who’s witnessing this, or anyone who’s viewing this testimony, is to imagine your loved ones put in such positions. Your brothers, your sisters, your nieces, your nephews, your aunts, and your uncles, and more importantly, and maybe most importantly, to be able to put ourselves in the Iraqis’ shoes who encountered these events every day and for the last five years.”
    In organizing Winter Soldier, IVAW took its inspiration from Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which organized a precedent-setting gathering in 1971 in Detroit. At that time, the United States had reached a point in the Vietnam War very similar to the Iraq War in 2007. Public opinion had moved decidedly against the war, coalition partners like Australia and New Zealand were withdrawing their troops, and the Pentagon Papers, which had just been released, documented a long history of official lies. And yet the war continued, as President Richard Nixon pushed ahead with an expansion of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, which included the invasion of Cambodia.
    Vietnam Veterans Against the War were determined to play a role in changing the course of the war. They gathered in Detroit to explain what they had really done while deployed overseas in service of their country. They showed, through first-person testimony, that atrocities like the My Lai massacre were not isolated exceptions.
    “[The 1971] Winter Soldier heralded a significant change of opinion in the American public toward Vietnam veterans,” wrote historian Gerald Niccosia in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, “not only in terms of a new willingness to hear their side of things, but also in the amount of respect and credibility they were accorded.”2
    Over a dozen members of Congress endorsed the gathering. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan called for full congressional investigations into charges leveled by the veterans at the Winter Soldier hearings. Three months later, twenty-seven-year-old Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, who had served on a Swift boat in Vietnam, took VVAW’s case to Congress and spoke before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Television cameras lined the walls and veterans packed the seats.
    “Many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia,” Kerry told the committee, describing the events of the Winter Soldier gathering. “It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit—the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.”
    In one of the most